The United Nations, which continues to operate as a powerful validator of the territorial nation-state might also seem to contradict my suggestion that the territorial basis of the nation-state is rapidly eroding. Yet, if we look at the moral and material role of the United Nations in peacekeeping and humanitarian operations throughout the world, it seems clear that it is itself emerging as a major transnational force in Africa, the Middle East, Cambodia, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. Of course, its troops are limited, and it often seems incapable of decisive action. But until we have more careful studies of the composition, commitment, and politics of United Nation forces, their national sources and their ideological practices, it would not be wise to dismiss the possibility that the U.N. is helping to erode the idea of the territorial integrity of existing nation-state. In this sense, whether in Korea or Cambodia, Somalia or Palestine, the United Nations is in the process of exemplifying the transmutation of national resource into transnational interests of a new and puzzling sort. What is puzzling about this example is that national resources given over to an organization intended to be a vehicle of international wishes are subsidizing activities that might actuaily reduce national control over a growing number of “trouble spots.” Thus the United Nations, particularly after the Cold War, looms as a serious player in its own right in the global market for loyalty.